Thunder God (2 page)

‘Yes?' I replied.

‘Why did you go out there in the middle of the night?'

‘It was Greycloak,' I told her.

Kari looked pale and worried, but my mother was smiling, pale wrinkles on her sun-browned face. ‘That man has been dead for years,' she said. ‘It must have been a dream. Have you forgotten what I tell you every night? There are no gods, no demons …'

‘It was him!' I shouted her back into silence.

Greycloak's real name was Sasser Geirson.

Thirty years before I was born, he had arrived in Altvik, claiming to be a priest sent to take the place of one who had just passed away. He wore a cloak whose undyed wool had been tarnished by the smoke of sacrificial fires into the dinginess that gave the man his name.

Tostig had been apprenticed to the town's old priest, but now he began working with Greycloak. They barely had a chance to learn each other's names before another priest arrived, claiming that Greycloak was a fraud and had robbed him of his possessions. He chased Greycloak into the mountains and out across a bridge of snow which collapsed, sending Greycloak down a crevasse. For a while, the priest could hear him calling out from far below, his voice growing fainter as the cold sucked out his life. The priest left him there to die and
went back to where he had come from, saying there was nothing for him here and that Greycloak had got what he deserved – to be tombed in a glacier, along with the things he had stolen.

Tostig took over the running of the temple and had been there ever since.

In the years that followed, a great silence settled on those mountains where Greycloak had disappeared, as if it was a living thing, warning us to stay away.

By the time I came along, what truth remained of Greycloak's life had become so tangled in the legends, that no one knew anymore which was which. In our minds, he lived now in a great hall made of ice. High on the bared-rock skull of the Grimsvoss, he had found a way to go on living past all boundaries of age, shrugging the burden of time from his old flesh and bones. He came down only in the storms, riding the wind like a horse when it blew across the glacier's wrinkled skin. On those nights, while we hid ourselves away from the gasping thunder of the storms, he walked the streets and scraped his long-nailed hands across our doors, letting us know he was back. People said if you were brave enough to follow him, he might lead you to his treasure. And if you were quick, you might fill your pockets with silver and find your way back home. But no one yet had been that daring, no one that fast.

Olaf and I had sworn a secret pact that we would be the ones. When the storms blew in, we never slept, waiting for that scratching on the door, praying for courage and speed.

Was it just a dream I had? Was Greycloak no more than a skeleton, sleeping in the cradle of the glaciers? Or had he called me out into the storm? A hundred times I relived that moment. Each time I grew less sure of what I had seen. Only the lightning was certain. Only the fire, branching from the sky to stop my heart and set it beating once again.

In this way, my life began a second time.

By the end of the first week, my hair turned grey and fell out.

My father sat at the table, whose legs had been fashioned from the rib-bones of a whale. He stared helplessly while my sister swept the floor around his feet and my mother fed me bowls of orange cloudberries, salted goat's milk and smoked reindeer meat which made my jaw ache because it was so hard to chew.

My father's name was Magnus. He was a tall man, always stooping to leave or enter our house. He had a shyness that did not match his size and a moustache which my mother said made him look like a walrus. He worked by himself on a small fishing boat which rarely strayed far from the shore. I looked forward to the day when I would join him in his work.

On summer mornings, Kari and I used to sit on the stone wall of our garden, watching his boat out on the bay. Sunlight fell like embers through the pines which grew along the rocky shore, making tiny stars of every dandelion on the turfed roofs of the town. I would feel its warmth brush like a hand across my face and see the flicker of my father's net as he cast it out over a shoal of fish.

He had a gift for knowing when schools of fish came to the bay. He would be sitting at the table, in the middle of saying something, when suddenly he would tilt his head to one side, as if he were cricking his neck. ‘The salmon are here,' he would whisper. Or it would be the herring, or the mackerel, and he was always right. He told me that he felt it like a rushing in his heart, as if the movement of a million fins deep in the black water of the bay had sent a ripple through the red tide of his blood.

Nobody seemed to find my father's premonitions strange, but a boy who had been struck by lightning, and survived, was too much to ignore. They said that those who have been struck
are marked as outsiders by the gods themselves, granted sight beyond what human eyes can see.

In the days that followed, as my mother and father went about their usual business, Kari never left my side. She treated me the same as she had always done and was the only one who did.

I found this out when Olaf and Ingolf came to see me. They lifted the blanket from my egg-smooth head and gasped. When I tried to tell them that I was not sure what I had seen, Olaf said that there could be no doubt. He talked and talked, saying this was proof at last, and that all our searching had been worthwhile. While he spoke, Ingolf just stared at me, the way he would have looked at something dead.

My father, like Olaf, was also convinced that I had passed through a hidden gateway into the world beyond. What worried him was that I might not have returned as the same person. When he thought I was asleep, I heard him tell my mother of rumours he had heard in town, that I was some creature living inside the strapped-on flesh of the dead boy I had been, sent to spy on them from beyond the realm of dreams. I could tell from the tone of his voice that he believed these stories, and his suspicions only grew when my once-brown hair grew back a coppery red, like some reflection of the lightning's fire.

As soon as this news reached the ears of Ingolf's mother, Tola, she sneaked up to our house after dark. She impaled the head of a white-faced owl on a stick in our garden to ward off the evil spirit that she said I had become. My mother discovered Tola just as she was sprinkling flakes of dried owl blood on our doorstep. She grabbed the first thing she could lay hands on, which was a mackerel, and chased Tola down the hill, clubbing her over the head with the dead fish.

After that, Ingolf was no longer allowed to see me.

From Olaf, I heard nothing at all.

Eventually, even Kari had to go. Despite her protests, our parents sent her down into town every day, to begin an apprenticeship which had been arranged with the village tailor. Kari left home at dawn and returned home only in the evenings, too tired to do anything more than eat her meal and go to sleep. This work brought her new respect from my parents. A new sleeping bench was built for her, and she and I no longer shared the one which was left to me. Kari did not have to cook or clean, except one day a week. My parents spoke to her with a strange formality, as if to place a distance between themselves and her. They knew the time was drawing near when she would leave their house for good, and they had already begun their long goodbye.

I would also be leaving home more often. Or so I had been told. This was to be the year that I began work with my father on his boat, but suddenly my father changed his mind, believing I had now been chosen for a different path.

In preparation for this, instead of teaching me about his trade, he began to share what he knew of the world beyond our own.

Late in the afternoons, when he returned from his work, he would bring me out to the storage barn, where smoked hams dangled from the rafters and baskets of wrinkled apples were stacked in the corners. He would place two milking stools in the middle of the cramped space and motion for me to sit in front of him. My father spoke as much with his hands as he did with his mouth, long fingers trailing through the air and white palms appearing and disappearing as he clenched his sunburnt fists. ‘Far below us,' he said, ‘are the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree in whose branches the world hangs like a
never-ripening
fruit. These roots form the roof of a house, which belongs to three widows called the Norns. They spin the multicoloured threads of life itself and weave the destinies of men.'
As he spoke, his fingers unravled an imaginary spool of yarn. ‘Coiled beneath the house of the Norns' – he twisted his feet around the legs of my stool and dragged me close, until our knees were touching – ‘is the Midgard serpent, which will wake on the day of Raggnarok and destroy the world in a storm of fire and ice.

‘We, the Aesir, live along the rocky shores and in the gentle valleys of the north, but above us, in the foothills of the mountains, live the Trolls. They exist in many forms, some with more than one head.' With these words, my father's open hand became a second face beside his own. ‘Some Trolls are the size of mice, others as tall as trees.' He stood and reached towards the ceiling, and then he began to pace around me, as if he had become the beast itself. ‘They hide in caves whose entrances we cannot see, leaving only at night and returning before dawn, because the rays of the sun will turn them into stone.' My father sat down with a dusty thump on the three-legged stool. ‘They are slow-thinking and bad-tempered but dangerous if you venture out at night into the hills.'

‘What do they eat?' I asked, filling my lungs with the dry, sweet smell of the storage barn.

‘They chew the moss from boulders.' He pretended to gnaw at his knuckles. ‘At night, if you watch carefully, you can see sparks from their teeth as they bite on pieces of flint, or you might hear the scrape of their bristly tongues over the rocks.

‘Higher still, up on the mountain tops, live the Jotun. They are giants; part ice, part flesh, part stone, whose hearts you can see beating in the frozen cages of their chests.' Rhythmically, he opened and closed his fist. ‘They hate us, who live down in the warmth of the valleys, and will butcher' – he hacked at the air with the knife edge of his palm – ‘anyone who wanders up into the snow. Afterwards, they use the victim's flesh like bloody bandages to fill the cracks across their hide.' And he
slapped his arms and legs, as if patching his own frost-rotted skin.

My father believed the tales that Greycloak had not died but lived among these monsters and preyed upon the snow-blind people who trespassed into their world. He lured them with music from a flute made from the shin-bone of a man. Welcoming them into his house, whose ice walls glowed an eerie blue, he would serve them a meal of bone-marrow soup in a cup made from a human skull. The blinded guests would compliment him on the soup and would ask about that strange sound they could hear – that hollow thump which seemed to fill the halls – never guessing that it was Greycloak's heart beating in a fleshless ribcage made of wrist-thick icicles. After the meal, he would give them a bed whose shaggy blanket was sewn together out of human scalps. The guests, still blind, would say how warm it kept them. Then, while they slept, Greycloak would bring his face close to theirs, suck all the air from their lungs and use their bodies to restore his own. With the remains, he would prepare another meal for the next lost traveller to be summoned by the music of his flute.

The ocean, too, was filled with spirits. My father spoke of Ran, the mother of nine beautiful, red-haired daughters, who had names like ‘She Who Is Glittering' and ‘She Whose Hair Is Russet in the Evening Sun.' They lived together in a drifting fortress on the sea. Its walls were made from foam-topped tidal waves, and its roof was a cloud of shrieking sea-birds. Ran spent her time gathering treasure from ships that her daughters wrecked and sent below the waves. My father swore he had seen their fortress, sliding like an iceberg through winter sea. He swore, too, that he had glimpsed those beautiful daughters, long hair wet against their milky backs.

‘I hear them calling me,' he whispered. ‘Their laughter echoes in my sleep.'

And above us all, my father said, beyond the ceiling of the sky, lay Asgard. This was the land of the gods, who dabbled sometimes cruelly in the fates of men below.

‘Those things are in your dreams,' my mother told him, if he was ever foolish enough to mention the subject in front of her.

But in my father's mind, the gods were not in our dreams. It was we who were in theirs.

At the centre of it all, he said, hidden someplace in the vastness of our northern world, was a secret that linked these worlds together. This was the very heart of our faith, whose source was kept so hidden that those who knew about it never revealed where it lay, or what its power was or even what it looked like.

One day, when my mother could stand it no longer, she stamped out to the storage shed, flung open the door and shouted, ‘I forbid you to believe those lies! It was nothing more than bad luck that you were struck by lightning, but your father refuses to see it that way. He has spent too much time out on the water catching fish and now he is starting to think like one.'

‘I am trying to explain the things he needs to know,' said my father, straining to remain calm.

‘You are not explaining,' she replied, raising her voice even louder. ‘You are just making noise. Fish noises. You are the one who needs to hear some explaining, but you are too stubborn to listen.'

He stood and faced her, clanging his head against one of the iron pots that hung on a hook from the crossbeam. ‘Stubborn? Who is stubborn, woman? You or me? You are more stubborn in what you do not believe than I am stubborn in what I do. And that, believe it or not …' he paused for an unbearably long time, then breathed in deeply and shouted, ‘is one of the reasons I love you!'